Does the 99 Percent movement represent a decoupling of the left from Obama and the Democrats?

It’s a mistake, I argued HERE the other day, to see the 99 Percent movement as just an arm of the campaign to re-elect President Obama.

Rather, the movement is far beyond Obama’s control and actually poses a challenge to his leadership.

Liberal journalist Peter Beinart is out with a column today that puts the movement in historical perspective and sees its emergence as a WATERSHED MOMENT for the political left:

Today’s Wall Street protests represent the left’s decoupling from Obama and the Democratic Party, something that the global nature of the movement will only reinforce. That doesn’t mean the movement has a clear critique of unregulated capitalism yet, let alone a concrete agenda for reform, but it means that the left finally is forcing those questions onto the public agenda. By confronting Wall Street, it is creating the populist energy that Obama himself has not.

What we are witnessing in Zucotti Park actually represents an improvement over the Obama campaign. That campaign was largely about faith in one man. The Occupy Wall Street movement, by contrast, represents a direct reckoning with the most powerful forces in American life, forces that are not voted in and out of office every two or four years. And it represents a belief that young Americans must force that reckoning by themselves. No politician will do it for them. Those instincts are exactly right, and we’ve never needed them more.

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“The Occupy Wall Street movement, now in its fourth week, has plenty to brag about. Its occasionally published newspaper, the Occupied Wall Street Journal, proclaims: “In the great cathedral of capitalism, the dispossessed have liberated territory from the financial overlords and their police army.”

How did protesters manage to take over Zuccotti Park, a half-acre plot a few blocks from Wall Street? It turns out that this land grab is not due to the power of social media. Instead, the main force letting protesters stay in the park is old-fashioned crony capitalism.”

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“Before being shut up by politicians, Brookfield spoke for hundreds of thousands of weary area workers and residents. This columnist, who lives a block from the park, can attest to the impact on the neighborhood, though I suppose I should be grateful that my newborn son is now mostly trained to sleep through late-night drumming, chanting and vuvuzela horns. Anyone tempted to idealize this movement should visit and contrast the aggressive, often drugged-out crew around the campsite with a family community still gamely rebuilding after 9/11.

Occupy Wall Street promised an Arab Spring of regime change. Protesters should know that the street bordering the park now called Liberty Street was called Crown Street from the 1600s until just after the Revolutionary War. The protesters are a couple of centuries late to our democratic revolution, but there’s still time to make a statement against crony capitalism. All they have to do is leave.”

The more I hear audio and video clips from the “occupy” movement the more embarrassed I am for these people. If they really believed what they were saying they would be on the front lawn of the White House protesting, not down on Wall Street.

I also find it very interesting that the worldwide versions of the “occupy” protests on October 15th that were most likely to become violent and even more strident took place in countries that have had an even more left (socialist) government structure.

The common underlying theme of many of these people seems to be that life isn’t always fair, I don’t like that and I want someone else to pay for it. That is not likely to be a very effective theme to engender real change and really fix the various issues that have upset them.